About every other month or so, I have a client or a workshop attendee who asks me if blogging is a dying art. They tell me they heard from a friend of a friend or another social media expert that Facebook and Twitter are replacing blogs.

The answer is longer than I can usually give when I’m short on time and the person is standing in front of me wants a black and white YES or a NO answer.

But I have a little room here, so I’m going to pontificate.

Here’s why blogging is going to be around for a long, long time:

I want you to think about your online marketing strategy in terms of a bicycle wheel. Your website and your blog are the HUB, the center of the wheel – they hold everything together. Social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are the spokes.

But the spokes always lead back to the hub. Without the hub, the wheel loses its center and the bike doesn’t move forward. But without the spokes, nothing will connect the hub to the outside rim, and the bike doesn’t move forward.

That’s why it is critical for anyone who is developing an online marketing campaign – whether you’re a business owner, a personal blogger or an author trying to market a book – to grow and nurture both your blog AND your social media tools. They work together.

Note: If you feel more comfortable doing so, you can mentally substitute the word “website” every time I used the word “blog”. It doesn’t matter whether you call it a blog or not, but what DOES matter is that you have a place on your site where you can consistently and easily publish valuable content for your audience. The key to success online, whether you call it blogging or not, is providing something valuable for your audience. And for that, you need a content management platform.

It turns out that WordPress, the world’s biggest content management platform, started out as a blogging tool. And it’s a fun, incredibly easy way to publish great content on your site. It’s also growing by leaps and bounds each year, as more and more people discover easy ways to use it to grow their sites and their audiences using blogging and content management tools.

So before anyone yells panic about blogging, and decides to ditch WordPress and their online content efforts, please consider this scenario:

Which is more likely to be found by the search engines two years from now – a meaty, informative blog post you write and publish today, or the Tweet you wrote two minutes ago? That’s right – the blog post wins.

Which one will be most likely to get you search engine traffic, develop relationships and encourage conversation? Probably the Tweet, right?

And you need both to make your online life sing. So when you sit down at your computer to build your platform and develop relationships with people who can move you toward your goals, please remember to nurture that bicycle – you’ll need the wheel hub AND the spokes to get where you want to go. Otherwise, you’ll just be stuck in one place…and with life moving this fast, you’ll want to be able to ride around with the wind whipping through your hair!

Wheeeeeeee!